'We Try to Have the Best'

[JRJ 10.1-2 (2016) 126-152] (print) ISSN 1753-8637 doi:10.1558/jazz.v10i1-2.28344 (online) ISSN 1753-8645 ‘We try to have the best’: How nationality, race and gender structure artists’ circulations in the Paris jazz scene Myrtille Picaud1 Centre Européen de Sociologie et de Science Politique, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sci- ences Sociales, Paris, France [email protected] Abstract This article examines how international circulations of jazz artists in the Parisian jazz scene are structured by hierarchies based on the artists’ nationalities, gender and ‘race’. To do so, the author first describes which artists are showcased in the capital’s clubs and festivals in terms of gender, nationality and country of residence. This shows that the well-known venues in Paris book (male) American rather than French or other artists, and that their added symbolic value is simultaneously economic. Finally, the article centres on how the artists are presented in two specific festivals, revealing that even though ‘otherness’ and value are constructed along racial and gendered divides, they are also informed by artists’ nationality. Indeed, the dominant position of the United States and the opposition between the Western world and the global South are strongly dramatized within jazz in France, which shows some proximity to the ‘world music’ scene. Keywords: gender; international circulations; music scene; nationality; Paris; place; statistics Introduction Jazz, in its various incarnations, spans different social categories, from race to class, gender to generational interest. A simple visit to any European jazz festival today would reveal the music’s abil- ity to reach different audiences and to speak for a diverse range of people. Moreover, in a European context, jazz is not just a national music, but a model of transnational innovation; the music supports the mobility of artists, the sharing of knowledge, and the benefits of cultural exchange. In a political context where there is often a fine line between xenophobia and nationalist sentiment, jazz provides us with a powerful symbol of European diversity, networking and the 1. Myrtille Picaud is a teaching assistant in sociology at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and a PhD candidate at Centre Européen de Sociologie et de Science Poli- tique/Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. She works on cultural intermedi- aries (bookers) in the musical scenes of Paris and Berlin and has conducted previous research on different marginal or alternative cultural fields. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2016, Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield S1 2BX. ‘We try to have the best’ 127 positive impact that the influence of other cultures can bring (Whyton 2012: iv).2 In this excerpt from its research report, the Europe Jazz Network advocacy group presents jazz as a model of tolerance and openness. It inscribes jazz in a national, as well as transnational context, subsequently resituated within Europe.3 Perhaps this transnational perspective is not new, since jazz is seen as stemming from African American folk music (and, as such, arguably also perceived as originating from the ‘Black Atlantic’ (Gilroy 1995)). From a European point of view, this music also represented a modernity coming from the United States (Roueff 2013). From there, different topics arise in academic research about the social place of jazz. It has been apprehended through the prism of ethnicity and race (Peretti 1992; Bohlman and Radano 2000), and the role of these factors in the construction of jazz’s authenticity has been identified in critics’ discourse about the music, in the way it is appropriated or in terms of the musician’s experience (Born and Hesmond- halgh 2000; Suzuki 2013). Roueff goes as far as saying that in Europe, high- brow music was developed and defined in opposition to popular music, but that since the seventeenth century, this partition took on ‘the gendered language of races’4 (2013: 8; see also Dorlin 2006). Politicized receptions of jazz in France, drawing on anti-American feeling after the Second World War, redefined jazz as music from an oppressed ‘black’ minority group, opposing it to American mass culture and denouncing racism and segregation (Tournès 2001). Issues concerning gender have also shed light on the social representations of jazz and its authenticity, as well as on access to and segregation in the music market (Bares 2012; Ravet 2011; Rustin and Tucker 2008; Tucker 1998; Whiteley 1997). In his research about blues, Grazian shows that authenticity is transformed into a form of currency within the Chicago music scene (2003). Secondly, the circulation of jazz from the United States to other geographical areas, and the various ways in which it was received and interpreted, have also been examined (Ake 2004; Dorin 2012; McKay 2005; Parsonage 2005; Rusch 2015; Taylor Atkins 2003). The terms used in the Europe Jazz Network’s report also hint at the economic transactions bred within the European Union’s market, which serve as the backdrop to the development of European jazz. This underlines 2. Author’s emphasis. 3. The author would like to thank Madeline Bedecarré, Ana Portilla and the journal’s anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this article. 4. Author’s translation of the original French, here and throughout. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2016. 128 Jazz Research Journal another dimension, the fact that artistic exchanges and productions are embedded in more global economic and political stakes and networks. Research about globalization (see Crane 2002) has pointed to processes of hybridization (Appadurai 1996), the erasure of national frontiers and sub- sequent fluidity in international exchanges (Sassen 1996; Bauman 1998), the risk of imperialistic domination (Tomlinson 1991) or, on the contrary, the emergence of more diversity. The overstepping or transgression of national boundaries must be taken into account in the analysis of cultural circulations, as well as biases linked to methodological nationalism entrenched in our ways of practising research (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003). How- ever, I develop here the idea that national categories continue to determine the symbolic capital attached to artists’ performances (Bourdieu 1996), much in the same way that race and ethnicity function as tools for critical appraisal in the American literary field (Chong 2011). Indeed, this article attempts to show how artists’ nationality and place of residence influence which venues showcase the artists, as well as how gender and ethnicity continue to inform the way they are perceived and represented. To support my argument, I will use research pertaining to other artistic sectors. Working on contemporary art, Alain Quemin (2013) has shown that although international prize lists are presented as universal and art dealers recuse territoriality as taking part in their choices of artists, these lists reveal the permanence of national categories: indeed citizens from the United States and Germany largely dominate the market. Research in translation studies has also examined how unequal flows between centres and periph- eries structure global cultural markets (Heilbron 1999; Sapiro 2010). In her analysis of book translations, Sapiro (2008) further indicates that the type of languages translated differs according to the publisher’s position: smaller ones tend to favour translations from semi-peripheral or peripheral languages because they cannot compete economically with larger and more com- mercial publishing houses, which translate from central languages such as English. Music rarely involves translation, and thus is often portrayed as circu- lating more ‘freely’, especially with the rise of transfers via the internet (Jung and Shim 2014). Unlike a book however, live music rarely moves without its musicians, their physical presence inducing specific modes of circulation. Although music is often territorialized (‘the Detroit sound’, ‘Berlin techno’, ‘Ivorian Coupé-Décalé’ and so on), the research on relations between place and music may still be developed. The ‘scenes’ approach (Bennett and Peter- son 2004) develops the link between musical styles and particular locations; these also relate to virtual places (mailing lists, forums). Historical studies © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2016. ‘We try to have the best’ 129 have linked the emergence of popular music to urban places (Scott 2008), the nature of artistic scenes to specific and localized audiences (Weber 2004; Charle 2008) and concerts to the venue’s architecture (Bödeker et al. 2008). Sound studies have also broached the relationship between place identity, ‘scapes’ and sound (see Bull 2013). Different authors have examined how jazz was received in France (Tournès 1999; Roueff 2013). Within the same city (Paris), clubs may even be distributed in distinct locations, according to the type of jazz they play and the different music experiences they offer (Lizé 2010). Similar considerations are made about ‘world music’ venues in London (van Klyton 2015). Indeed, this musical genre offers an interesting field in which to address the issue of place, since The creation and diffusion of world music emphasize how particular constructions of ethnicity and diversity are central to the produc- tion, marketing and commodification of culture, in a somewhat naive and simplistic celebration of authenticity and ethnic and geographical diversity (Connell and Gibson 2004: 345). This construction

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